EMAIL: redman01@concentric.com
NAME: Tim Redman
TOPIC: Time
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION
COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Win95 3.0b
TOOLS USED: Just the main ray tracing engine
RENDER TIME: 4 hours, 48 minutes, 54 seconds
HARDWARE USED: 486DX2-66, 8M RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "Through Time"
This image is a TARDIS, a time machine from the popular
British science-fiction show DR. WHO, spinning through
the space-time continuum, leaving a wake of clocks in
it's path.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I've been mostly programming for Vivid 2.0 for the past several years, and
have just now switched over to POV-Ray 3.0. In an effort to force myself
into learning the mechanics of the ray-tracing engine, I decided that my
first effort would be completed entirely without the help of any outside
tools. This simple first effort is the result of that.
My initial thoughts on creating an image with the "Time" theme were that
an image of a clock, in one form or another, was an easy one, and one that
would be exploited by many of the artists in this competition, so it was
my primary intention to stray from the clock theme as much as possible.
However, somewhere along the line as it always happens, a little voice in
the back of my head said that this was unavoidable.
A bulk of the TARDIS is simply a large block where CSG has been used to
carve and whittle pieces off of it. Most components of the drawing have
been individually created, and then either cut-and-pasted into the main
source, or #include'd once they were where I wanted them. The lettering
on the upper portion of the police box utilize the font feature of 3.0,
and it took some doing to get it positioned correctly. All four sides of
the police box were separately done, since the CSG difference function
isn't terribly cooperative about transforms. The light at the top of the
box is a halo object contained inside a glass sphere and cylinder union,
enclosed by a cage made of cylinders and clipped torus' (torii?). The
police box color is the only custom texture in the entire image, being a
colored implementation of one of the stock wood textures.
The pocket watches are CSG items made from flattened spheres and torus'
(torii?) using the stock gold color. The time tunnel is merely a hollow
cylinder with a halo'd sphere at the far end. The texture for the tunnel
is the Apocalypse sky pattern from TEXTURES.INC. With the exception of
one, all textures and colors are stock, coming from the original POV-Ray
colors.inc and textures.inc files. The whole scene was programmed
painstakingly by hand, and rendered in a reasonably short period of time.
The image isn't at all a complex one. It has always been my theory with
ray-tracing that the simpler the image, the more pure it is. Detail is
best included subtley, though there aren't many subtle details in this
image.
I encourage any kind of comments you might have on this image, especially
from the more seasoned artists. Ray-tracing and modelling is a reasonably
new art form for me, one that I just lately have taken up with a certain
amount of zeal and passion. Any help from the experienced on this is always
appreciated, and I do answer all of my E-mail on the subject.